Chips under a village sky

YOU get just 15 minutes on a Monday evening to buy freshly cooked fish and chips from a mobile chippie in the little Lincolnshire village of Donington on Bain so I’m parked up early by the local school.

The van comes round the corner bang on schedule and before it’s even wheeled to a stop a door slides open and the smell of frying fills the air.

For the Jolly Rogers mobile chippy (apostrophe not included) Donington is the fifth and last village of the night on its weekdays schedule. There are a dozen or so of us waiting, politely forming a queue in the order we have arrived.

Fifteen minutes is generous. One stop in one night rates only five minutes according to the timetable.

Mobile fish frying is a two person job. There’s the driver-cum-frier who is at the sizzling little range as soon as he has put the handbrake on .And the lady who scribbles down your order, boxes it up and takes the money, cards accepted, does it all at lightning speed.

Jolly Rogers is a family business and there has been a van scuttling along Lincolnshire’s back roads for the last half century.

Not the same van, of course. I’m only a once a year when on holiday customer and last year it was red.

The fish is haddock. We are north of that invisible dividing line that runs between Sheffield and Barnsley when the People’s Fish changes from cod to haddock.

A very nice fillet it is, too, cooked expertly with a crisp, crunchy batter cooked all the way through, decent chips and fluorescent green mushy peas.

There’s always a little bit of magic going out to the chippie and somehow it’s even better queuing up in the middle of a village on a blustery April evening.

A long time to get it right

Two Steps, in business since 1895

It’s a Fish and Chips Friday so the plates are warming on a pan of simmering water, the kitchen table is laid with cutlery, bread and butter, vinegar, ketchup and tartare sauce and the neighbours’ cat is settling into the corner with an expectant look while I’ve nipped down to the chippie.

Not just any fish and chip shop. Readers who know I like my food seasoned with a good back story will hardly be surprised at my choice: Two Steps on Sharrow Vale Road, Sheffield. There’s plenty of history in these premises, frying fish for 120 years, since James Bolton set up shop in 1895. This is very probably the oldest in the country on the same spot, certainly in Yorkshire.

If not history, then popular culture. Tony (Is This the Way to Amarillo?) Christie posed here for an album cover while the mostly forgotten Carol-Anne Showband sang about joining the queue to be near a girlfriend (was she serving?) in Two Steps. “In 1895 this old ship set sail/ Why go to France when you can go to Sharrow Vale?” Indeed.

But the main reason I’m queuing up for cod, haddock, one small portion of chips (in reality enough for three) and fluorescent green mushy peas is that the food is remarkably good. As one satisfied customer puts it on TripAdvisor, it’s a “simple chippy, no dodgy kebabs . . .” although current owner Leggy Kafetzis, being Cypriot, would have a legitimate excuse. “They’ve had a long time to get it right” notes another Trippie.

The menu is short: cod, haddock, Yorkshire fishcake, cod’s roe, rissole, chips, sausages, Pukka Pies and, a modest little speciality, the Two Steps’ pea fritter. I’m having the haddock because Sheffield, always a border city as far as Yorkshire is concerned, is on that boundary where the southern preference for slightly effete cod becomes the northern choice for much more manly haddock. And because Leggy once tipped me the wink that the haddock is invariably fresh.

Serving up

Sometime the queue stretches out of the door and into the rain but tonight it’s short. “Any haddock in?” I ask the frier, a man in a pony tail, Leggy not being about. As the son of a chippie I know it’s better to order haddock when you arrive, rather than wait for it to be cooked. There are, four fillets.

If you’re a first-timer on recommendation the back wall opposite the counter will reassure you your tea is in safe hands. It is a newspaper hall of fame with cuttings from most of Fleet Street, including The Times and the Guardian, extolling Two Steps’ virtues. It gets its name from the two steps at the door.

I have my order wrapped, unsalted and unvinegared because I am not a lover of non-brewed condiment. I can do it back home with pickled onion vinegar. They do big portions here. Back home, unwrapped, my haddock lolls right across the dinner plate and hangs over. The batter is dry and crisp, the fish steamed inside to its full flavour. I have a bite of my wife’s creamier-looking cod: just as good.

Good chips don’t always have to be triple-cooked Jengas. Leave that to chefs.These are soft and limp but not at all greasy. We all like them, including the cat.

Two of us have eaten for just under a tenner. It’s plain, simple food honestly cooked but just as important the offering is consistently good. There’s nothing worse than looking forward to the chippie all day and being disappointed.

But as the man said, they’ve had a long time to get it right.

249 Sharrow Vale Road, Sharrow Vale, Sheffield S11 8ZE. Tel: 0114 266 5694
http://www.twostepssheffield.co.uk

Haddock, chips and mushy peas

A chip off the old block?

Seafayre, Charles Street

*Seafayre has now closed. See the Stop Press at the end.

The first restaurant I was taken to as a child was a fish and chip emporium somewhere in Newcastle by my grannie. It had a plastic tomato on the table for the sauce so I squeezed it, as you do when you are nine. The ceiling must have been low because I splodged it, Beano-style. I don’t recall being taken again.

At Seafayre on Charles Street, Sheffield, if you ask they bring the tomato sauce, mayonnaise and tartare sauce in little dishes. Perhaps someone has told them about my propensities for splodging but they do that for everyone.

I like Seafayre as does my whole family and I find to my surprise that it is the restaurant I have visited the most since I handed in the Free Meals Voucher that goes with the job of restaurant reviewer (it’s an expense account).
Sheffield as a great northern city ought to have at least a couple of big fish and chip restaurants. It’s here that the national fish of preference switches from cod to haddock, or it used to do. The city is also the birthplace of the famous Sheffield fishcake (slices of potato enclosing fish, the whole then battered and fried) although it is not always done well. But it doesn’t.

Going back, in the Sixties there was the local equivalent of Harry Ramsden’s, Hopkinson’s Capri on Rockingham Gate, chippie downstairs, restaurant above, run by David Baldwin, now host of Baldwin’s Omega off Psalter Lane. That was before my time but on a much smaller scale there was later the Harlequin Fish Bar on Howard Street, with a couple of rooms full of atmosphere and the smell of frying fish. Pensioners queued in the morning to be sure of a table and for office workers fish and chip Fridays were a tradition.

I visited it once or twice in a professional capacity but it closed in 2003 and the owner retired to the east coast. It lingered on in our memories. Two years later Designers Republic produced a poster which read simply “Harlequin Fish Bar, Rest In Peas.”

Today there is Whitby’s, big and vast on the outskirts of the city, and recently reviewed by my colleague Martin Smith on The Star. See here: http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/food-drink-whitby-s-fish-and-chips-1-6947584

Seafayre opened last year in what used to be Pollards, the coffee company. The owner, Bruce Payne, previously ran a chippie on the old Castle Market but baulked at the rents of the new one on The Moor. He has married into a chippie dynasty in Sheffield which dates back to the Fifties and the family has several shops around the city. Seafayre is named after a family venture downstairs in Orchard Square which ran for 10 years until 1997.

There is a takeaway section and a restaurant, done out in a coffee and cream livery so you half think Bruce didn’t bother to give the place a makeover after Pollards left. But no, he didn’t want to be typecast with fishy blue. I beg to differ: when it comes to chippies you can’t have enough of tradition so give me aquamarine, fish nets and glass balls any day.

The waiting staff are lovely, most of whom seem to be left-handed, check back your order sweetly, give you your bill before you’ve eaten and make sure if you have kids they get a lollipop. The menu is limited, cod, haddock, plaice, scampi, Sheffield fishcake and pie in regular, pensioners’ and children’s portions. The quality is good, the batter dry, crisp and crunchy, the mushy peas homemade with that lovely mealy quality. They don’t do starters but you can have a pudding, not guaranteed to be homemade.

Bruce used to offer gluten-free but got little call and when the fryer broke down that was it. His initial refusal not to serve fishcakes in the restaurant because they were not classy enough was overcome by customer demand. Initial thinking to offer sole and turbot has remained fish pie in the sky. Seafayre, with its mix of pensioners, families and couples, is not that sort of place. But it does have faint echoes of the atmosphere that was in the Harlequin so you could call it a chip off the old block.

We went recently with three picky granddaughters for a pre-panto meal. The previous year we went to a pizza joint, paid a fortune and they grumbled and left half of it. At Seafayre the bill for five of us, with pop and loose leaf tea* for two, was £34. And they didn’t leave a thing.

https://www.facebook.com/seafayre?fref=ts

*Since this was written the loose leaf tea has been replaced with teabags in a cup and a teapot of hot water. Apparently customers, many of whom are pensioners, were whingeing the tea was too weak/strong but probably they had not got anything else to complain about that day. Loose leaf tea is still available at £1.80 but is not on the menu.

STOP PRESS: The place closed on Wednesday, December 23, 2015, because the prospect of redevelopment seemed nearer. Bruce and his wife Helen will re-open in the Moor Market by the beginning of February. “We’ll be a takeaway, which is what we were on the old Sheaf Market,” says Bruce.
The restaurant section has been a success but the couple say they are not restaurateurs. “We’re market chippies and will go back to doing that.”

Haddock, chips and mushy peas